What the authors usually miss is that the things they call out as killing the Bay Area (home prices, job shifting, taxation, Etc.) have been true for at least the last 60 years. What they miss are the things that power the engine.
Those things are an at will work force, with legislative protection against non-competes, combined with wealth sharing/creation that is unlike any other place in the world.
There are more IPOs coming out this year, Lyft, Uber, and others. And already the real estate folks have said "prepare for the shock of higher prices." That is because there will likely be thousands of millionaires minted over the course of the year. And while that wealth will be distributed unevenly, some will be lucky, and others will not, once again there will be a refreshing of the 'who got rich with some big event' sorts of stories and people will "know" someone who got rich. I got to experience that when Sun went public, lots of people I knew as co-workers were now much much wealthier than I was, they were buying houses in Palo Alto and Saratoga and I thinking about private school for their kids. Sometimes, or or the other of a married pair dropped out of the workforce. And with that wealth people left the companies where they made their money and went to other companies to grow them. Some of them got to experience that IPO burst, two, three, and even four times.
You get groups of people who "self fund" their adventure/idea and work for free on some new topic. That is hard to do if you don't already have independently wealthy engineers to start with.
Think for a moment if your city was full of people in their 30's and 40's whose lifestyle and needs was fully funded by their existing wealth. Do they sit around and sip drinks on the porch? Not here they don't. They get together and start building stuff. Sometimes small things, sometimes big things. And when they do, there is no shortage of capital companies that are willing to augment their efforts in exchange for a piece of the pie. And some times that explodes again into another pile of wealth.
It is certainly a pretty unique place to hang out. And I expect that is part of why it is so hard to "replicate."